No conspiracies, just changes - advances in labor saving technologies causing disruption. Also a need for a means of keeping patients in hospitals in the right areas, with others of approximately the same economic class. (Preventing "class mixing" which could cause liabilities. Because rich people get much better healthcare than poor people.) They even have separate waiting rooms, just like in the old South (US history, similar issues existed in other countries with similar lack of justification. Their legacy of poverty survive and colonialism survives)
So now MONEY is the justification, even as the business case for money as it relates to work is diminishing. (Shhhh!) As the need for worker bees vanishes, that will be money which millions or even billions of people will suddenly have no way of earning. And not so gradually, few or no prospects if the current system continues. While large segments of society still have never contemplated any of this, the rich have been for decades, one could even say they have been obssessed by it. And they have come up with a plan to steal the world, as it were. But like all of the best laid plans, its guaranteed to fail. .
The rich may be many things but one of the things they arent always so good at is awareness of whats right and whats wrong.. Wealthy people are markedly less honest and less socially aware of their society's needs, than others. Study after study shows that. But, soon, if current trends continue, the very rich will literally "own" everything.
This is whats driving the obsession with surveillance. Projection.
I wrote a VERY long rant here, but I am going to delete most of it. All sorts of things are going on, and most of them involve that horrible thing, class. During the labor scarcity era, a anomalous situation developed around the world, briefly a middle class was created in many countries. Now the era of labor scarcity is ending.
Narcissists are well known for their habit of abandoning their old friends for new ones in order to gain a new source of narcissistic supply.
Narcissists always resent those they "need" with a special fervour. They resent society and working people all through the 20th century and a bitter battle developed between them.
Taylorism developed out of that push to turn all highly skilled workers into interchangeable parts, cogs in a big machine.
Out of that came a good thing, mass production.
And now we have "new friends", tiny machines who can do all the work, for electrons. Thats their pay.
To narcissists, everything is "The market" To them the whole world revolves around this "market" and nothing else.
Everything is a big trade. But humanity has outgrown that kind of thinking in many ways, but they are still obsessed by it.
Its turning into a real mess.
We have to understand for decades the elite in the developed countries have exploited their position of power and made promises. Some of them were in writing. Did they have the legal authority to make those promises, which decided to set aside democracy? Thats very debatable and one could say the answer is kind of obvious - its shown by their hiding it, no. But, to people in developing countries, who didnt see it as odd that they were making these promises of things forever, they didnt seem so.
Did they intend to keep those promises?
-???
What are trade deals, they are deals to put aside democracy and give corporations and countries entitlements. I am particularly going to discuss
trade in services.
With most US jobs being in various trade-able categories, and US companies desperately wanting to invest their money in the developing world, where growth is seen as potentially higher, (but, IS IT? I think that is also debatable - just look at how some of them have lagged behind while others, the ones that made an effort to reduce inequality- pulled ahead.)
In these negotiations typically we have a level of groupthink thats really out of control. They make assumptions which are unsupported by fact. But they get away with it because these negotiations are held behind closed doors. The things that get discussed are wishlists of bad policy ideas - With the changes that are being forced on the US for example, many or even all have already been rejected by legislatures.
They are based on totally unsupportable predictions of increased profits - they routinely frame large job losses as gains if they increase profits for the owners of companies.
So delusions of grandeur and greed.. are whats driving it, and the thing they are hoping to get by this trading game are profits overseas..
but I think they are grossly underestimating the willingness and ability to - LIKE THEMSELVES- of the leading groups in those countries to keep all the gains for themselves.
Both sides are making similar mistakes.. and similar bad estimates of the increases in wealth they plan to get.
Or at least thats the cover story.
(Situationists would analyze the dynamic differently)
Its quite possible, even probable that the whole thing is being pursued for completely different reasons than the ones alleged. It makes much more sense to see these things as efforts to impede true progress and roll back the gains of the late 20th century for all but a very few..
Its also likely, if they are trading existing jobs for alleged new markets, that they wont materialize for either side..
Automation will result in far fewer successful transformations of service jobs here into offshored long term contracts in developing countries, instead automation will proceed faster, driven by panic over various issues like security. (after all, so many people will be losing so much and are unlikely to be happy about it)
Having gotten where they are largely under the radar, continued growth for Indian IT outsourcing firms, in particular, may have already plateaued.. That would represent the end of a juggernaut of globalization that largely has sustained itself by a endless stream of misrepresentations and deceptions. So its putting its all into this one. For it to be exposed would likely spell the end of the entire global coup for at least a decade, well, maybe not, attention spans are getting shorter all the time.
But to return to the so called "grand bargain between north and south" I think it will be a collossal fail, its hoped for jobs wont materialize for the elites in the developing countries to broker, and the hoped for markets wont appear as a result of giving away millions of jobs here.. In short its like the beans in the Jack in the Beanstalk story.. its all hype.. And in exchange for pie in the sky they screw the middle class and poor here, and create a situation that hurts legal immigrants and leaves the country unable to modify the conditions that are causing all these problems, because trade deals are forever.. so, they lie, they lie like crazy. And nowhere is this more annoying than when the supposedly progressive candidates lie too. Showing that its all a shameful sham that they all are in on, a scheme to screw all of us.
The increases in markets wont materialize, also the period of growth is likely to be short or non-existing. It would be better to expose the whole thing and let people have the long sought after changes - what they obviously need.
Otherwise, we can expect a total fiasco, worse than 2008 a cascade disaster which will include huge losses for Americans especially and the loss of sales to the developed world and its crash which will likely also cause major disruption in developing countries as the maintenance of their ruling groups and its social contracts depend on a ready source of patronage jobs which depend on their very wealthy's illicit gains and advantages.. Bad business models abound, both there and here. For 20 years a totally broken healthcare insurance system has been kept alive by a relentless push by the US to use its clout to force other countries to do like us and privaize.. based on an assertion that "progressive liberalisation" (irreversible privatization) was the only possible future (in a job-sparse future?!) which is a ridiculous propositin given the relative track records of public education and healthcare (successes) and private systems (much less so, even arguably failures)
You cant change so many things at the same time without a potential disaster to the goose that laid their golden egg, the middle class, I think this is not at all a wise strategy.
But they are just hell bent on it. Neoliberalism is very much a sort of cult. Almost a doomsday cult, because it wants to tear everything that exists now down. But he real motivator is greed. And power.
They want favorable terms, and what even a few years ago would have been abnormal kinds of protection against unforeseen eventualities.
They want this so badly that they are willing to give up anything for it. Therefore things look bad for American workers. The prospect is of globalization offshoring
as many as 41% of all US jobs in the coming years.
But, certain influential groups of people, and especially their children, some people will need secure jobs that cant be offshorable. Most skilled service jobs are targeted for globalization, even ones in services that haven't been invented yet) Two- the only two I know of large categories of jobs that can reliably qualify for exemption are either in privately held companies or national security related. A very narrow "governmental authority"exemption exists but it rarely applies in the US (because almost all services have some commercial component.) Areas like active military and other totally noncommercial "services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority" are likely exempt. Statutory systems of Social Security are only exempt under a
narrow set of conditions which may not apply any more - or likely wont soon ..Politicians, executive and legislative and judicial branch workers, assuming nobody else sells that service.. if its sold it is likely to be privatized and globalized soon. If anyone charges money for a like service, it is likely unqualified for exemption it is likely to be privatized and globalized.
They have already promised away most of the other high skill jobs in various ways, or plan to. Like IOUs. Thats one of the perks they see of being in power, steering money to your friends. In keeping wih the theme of extrinsic fraud, everything is inverted so its being done to (its claimed) eliminate corruption in procurement. Making contracts only winnable by low bids and objectve criteria like number of engineers in a company and their training and track record. This is a process which will help some kinds of firms (large ones) and hurt others - small firms will be completely excluded in many cases from tendering bids. There is also a new Government Procurement Agreement which is similar in many ways - which I am just trying to learn now. It uses an e-tendering system.
Code:
[Select]"For the purposes of this Agreement…
(b) 'services' includes any service in any sector except services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority;
(c) 'a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority' means any service which is supplied neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers."
So, we're going to need lots more surveillance technology put into everything people buy, even the most mundane devices, to justify the level of spending they will need to create a new class of surveillance infrastructure workers.
Its clearly abandonment of democracy when people, especially those in government, are limited in their freedom of expression, especially when they might be trying to help.
Are large surveillance infrastructures actually being created for aims which are not the stated ones? Economic reasons? Its possible. Blackmail is also a big driver for creation of surveillance infrastructure.
Countries like North Korea and East Germany created a society of informants where a third of the population was being blackmailed by their secret police.
to keep your security clearance workers in line by the prospect of losing their security clearances, and therefore their jobs and livelihoods. is justified by ever more draconian repression.
In order to keep the secrets secret and hide fact, ever more of a web of deception, still more secrets need to be created in huge incredible waste efforts..
I think the main goal of all this is social control. We already are lied to a very very great deal. (For example, the entire
healthcare "debate" going on right now in the US is a complete sham, criminally so.
The real issue is what amounts to a silent takeover of the world's economic future by corporations, in preparation for huge job losses which will come from both automation and "cross border data flows" - a subset of the stated goal, irreversible one way privatization ("progressive liberalization") of services. (All justified by a purported need to end democracy to protect international investors who once they have invested in setting up in a country are, in its "US style" or "top down" or "negative list" embodiment given a permanent entitlement to the state of regulation that existed at the signing date of some agreement, the so called "standstill date".. This in the case of healthcare and banking in the US its Feb 26, 1998, the date of the second group of agreements were ratified in procedures which seem to have been kept uniquely out of the public eye, especially in the UK and the US, because of their implications.. . -Subsequent rules have to be limited at the level that existed then, unless there was an exemption, which also needed to be made then. This is a circular argument which doesnt make any sense, really.)
It gets even more outrageous the more you learn, they are moving towards allowing qualified multinational corporations to have entitlements to "market access" which is a broad term that means much more than equality, as they are given additional rights domestic corporations could never be given, for example, once established (This is already there in a 1995 treaty) they will almost certainly gain irreversible rights to freely move employees across borders to take advantage of wage gradients, basically giving them permanent irreversible entitlement to temporary work permissions for their workers, under their own wages and using their own licenses. (This has frequently been compared to slavery) Basically "harmonization" of regulation to the lowest common denominator) This will be highly disruptive, and of course, domestic companies will be encouraged to sell their services abroad in countries where wages are higher, or where they provide some service which cant be obtained locally.
As far as what happens during demonetization, look at India and North Korea, both among the world's most corrupt and patronage ridden nations, who used it as a way to strengthen the ruling clique by removing large quantities of cash from circulation suddenly. The Indian government was being advised by US right wing think tanks which are pushing hard for a cashless future.
I think he conspiracy theoriests are all wrong, it has nothing to do with any of the below and its all about the math. Very large numbers of jobs are going away and every talented person cant have a job. They are raising the bars, requiring formal degrees and various other "objective" criteria for businesses hat engage in government procurement (procurement will become international) but increasingly, everybody will have degrees, likely advanced degrees.
So governments want the safe, good, non-offshorable jobs to go to the people who they most want to have them, preferentially, their own kids, as well as the children of their allies overseas. (who can be paid less, much less) And they want to set up as many ways as they can to arbitrarily exclude people to reduce the numbers of people who hey are expected to find jobs for, because they want to delay for as long as possible the creation of a welfare state which is the only civilized thing to do.. With so many people being out of work, hey are going to have an impossible situation so they want as many out of work people as possible to move elsewhere. They intend to use the aforementioned deal on services, and particularities of the special rules on health care insurance to do that. The US has been among the most gung ho nations in making commitments on things that other countries were careful to keep off the table. That tells us what their goals must be.
Recent negotiations in elitist and American-job-obsessed India which got coverage in the Indian press they never would have gotten here (coverage which mentions the negotiation of a deal where India helps provides health care for the poorest people in America, in exchange for changes which would help privatize Social Security eliminating its ability to provide a guaraneed benefit- which is a sore point for banks- ) also offers some clues.
Remember they want to keep people buying for as long as possible. To do that depends on creating a climate of fear and shame when people lose their jobs. They want to prevent the emergence of any kind of realization that these change are happening. Thats also one of the main social functions of insurance of all kinds. Its very important that people always think these bad things are only going to happen to other people, the media brainwashing of Americans (a totally phony good cop bad cop narrative that bears only the most distant resemblance to the reality) depends on it. It is very very good, the best n the world, and it can be relied upon to successfully make us fall for the same tricks again and again.
They need to create the impression a hideously broken system is enough of a "success" for other countries with rich elites to be able to propose it for heir own countries as a means of getting rid of their safety nets too. Because this is a fundamentally broken, extremely unhealthy system that is not able to create real wealth without making sacrifices that weaken it to the core in order to do so. Like trading away the future at the expense of their own people) For that and many other reasons it cant be a team player, it cannot exist alongside other competing systems, it has to keep expanding to control more and more or its Ponzi scheme will collapse trapping those 'investors' who remain tied to it. But that is basically impossible.
The isurance industry is a good example of how unhealhy and addicted to easy money it has become.
Healthcare and profit making dont mix well. Knowing this they created lock ins to force it to comply with their agenda or cause the creation of huge unpayable obligations for compensation. They created an artificial standstill - which could not be exceeded.. Now its claimed its needed to attract foreign firms, because of an artificially created phony crisis.. The real "need" is more like an addition.. the "highly mobile international capital" now is willing to cause any disaster in order to make huge returns.. To obey WTO rules, illegitimate ones, which are hidden from Americans by the media, private insurance industry gets a ability to petition WTO to tell us to return to the state of regulation in 1998.
This is being used to justify the total elimination of all the gains of the last 20 years.. a way to exclude people with pre-existing conditions. Its a "matter of principle" to maintain the high returns which its claimed highly mobile capital needs now. To get these foreign firms to come in they have to give them a way to exclude the sick, easy, just eliminate the rules which required hem to cover people with illnesses.. make it clear to them that they won't be required to cover sick or
"genelined" people.
Those patients will become pawns in their international game. Thats what the microchips will likely be all about.
Just as it was in Feb 1998. Many of those people will only be able to afford health care in the poorest nations without subsidies.
That's claimed by the WTO text to be "natural", as not everybody can have everything.
But, many of the worlds people disagree with that argument. So why is it being embedded into what5 amounts to an international law behind the worlds back?
No countries or families are more familiar with the benefits of being rich and the curse of poverty than the richest families in the most underdeveloped nations which almost always are ruled by just a few fabulously wealthy families. Those are the governments and families that the rich ruling class in the rich countries seem to want to keep in place because they allow a level of pillage reminiscent of colonialism, without the need to invest much money in a colonial infrastructure or maintenance of an administrator class.
So in the 1990s they started a gobal process of turning the selling of healthcare insurance and higher education and other things that everybody wants (unless "supplied neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers") into corporate rights.
WTO sees subsidies as representing a broken market - its solution is always more international trade.. "export patients, import doctors" as R.A., a WTO official once said.
So no conspiracy theories, just profit-lust driving all this. The middle class in developed countries are framed as protectionists, and after 20 years of relentless spin, their "work life balance" are now framed in fora like the G20 as standing in the way of a long awaited and immensely profitable global race to the bottom, framed as helping the poor, when its really helping the rich, everywhere make themselves richer, and eliminating public services, such as public health care and education, (framing them as a
theft from corporations of opportunities!)
Nothing unusual about that, we're just seeing a rapid increase in the audacity of the schemes, due to lack of integrity and corruption on all levels.
Also, "exclusionism" is a core aspect of these shifts. Excluding more and more people for arbitrary reasons. As the arbitrary exclusion of more and more of humanity becomes less and less justifiable, the aggressive practice of it will become more and more of a requirement for the cult's adherents. Even as they themselves are excluded they call out its praises. This is a characteristic of what is called
"totalitarianism" or
"totalism".
Quote from: abraxa on Today at 09:38:52>
Quote from: ataradov on Today at 00:27:17>
Can you actually tell what will happen if all money are digital and traceable? What control are you talking about? Control over what?
Governments have many ways to "control" people. Not all of them are bad.
Yes, you can tell because of the same way people censor themselves on Facebook because they know that third parties are reading it with great attention. If banks (and in extension, governments) know exactly where, when and what you purchased, you become not only predictable but also easy to blackmail. You will have to agree with everything the governments want or else they'll use that knowledge against you. You may think this is trivial now or that you have nothing to hide. But just like on Facebook, nothing is ever forgotten this way.
Something you did as a teen or young adult could come haunting you decades later when you least expect it - e.g. when trying to get a new job ("it says here you went to festival XYZ.
I'm afraid we don't want people in this company who associate with hippies"), apply for health insurance ("it says here you bought a glider. We're unable to accept you because you're at a high risk to be injured")
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